This album is a darker affair than the debut 'Unconquered', dealing with inner demons & chilly nightmares, just in time for Halloween season! In fact, an early version of 'Vampyrs' initially appeared on Silber Records' Halloween digital compilation, which was never pressed on CD anyway.

16 October 2008

Christy Romanick's "Very Large Array" book features a series of colored photographs shot in San Agustin, New Mexico. Christy captures the beauty and eeriness of VLA satellites occupying an isolated desert landscape. Also included is an exclusive 30 minute soundtrack cd titled "Transmissions to 3774379 258421 13S" by Montreal musician Thisquietarmy.

Space30a will be releasing the 20 page soft-covered 5.75 x 7.75 book late Autumn 2008. This is the first pressing of 50 signed and numbered copies. The cost is $25 US dollars which includes shipping*. We're taking pre orders now:

Pricing

About Thisquietarmy:

Thisquietarmy is the ambient/drone project of Eric Quach, from Montreal post-shoegazer band Destroyalldreamers. Armed with several effects and loop-samplers, his guitar-based sonic experimentations challenge the boundaries of the conventional guitar-drone mould by combining both non-frigid song structure and ambiance together, blending layers of textures over textures, merging faint growing melodies into a beautiful sea of noise.

For this conceptual soundtrack to Christy's breathtaking photographs, Thisquietarmy recreates the transmissions received through the various hybrid configurations (BnA, CnB, DnC) of the Very Large Array dishes in New Mexico located at 3774379 258421 13S on the grid-based UTM (Universal Transverse Mercator) coordinate system of the Earth's surface. Different sounds from outer space are captured through the different configurations such as the first televised transmission returning from space, signals from lost spacecrafts and random outer space phenomenons.

13 October 2008

Thisquietarmy intimately shares the personal (*cough* pretentious? *cough*) details of his musical output, guitar sounds, writing process, inspirations, world views, TQA records and of course the Montreal music scene - - - through a lengthy discussion by email over the span of a week with Fugues' Jerome Olivier, from Paris, France.

Cut & chopped up as a Q&A for Autres Directions, a french webzine who has also reviewed Unconquered earlier this year, here's the exclusive interview, en français only, sorry!

7 October 2008

Our featured release, the debut full length from the Canadian band Thisquietarmy, which is actually just one guy, but he creates a massive droneological sound with this collection of drifting guitar ambience and pummeling Industrial sludge. Fans of Nadja will definitely want to check this out, not only because Thisquietarmy at times offers up a likeminded form of blissed out, shoegazy heaviness, but also because Nadja's Aidan Baker himself appears on one of these tracks, contributing some great dreamy guitar drones.

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Also, a full-length, full-on / rave-on review! I don't know how to link it, so I'll just post it in its entirety, here:

Much the finest guitar-based heavy ambient music that I have been listening to lately has been coming from north of the border, Canada to be precise. Aidan Baker, obviously, for one; he's been on a roll this year with not only an assload of new Nadja releases but also a respectable number of solo discs, and all of 'em have been fantastic collections of spacious slowcore and dreamy drift. Then there is Aun, the solo industrial guitar drone project from Martin Dumais whose amazing Multigone disc was so heavy and alien sounding, I had to release it through our Crucial Bliss imprint.

Now there's another Canadian guitar-ambient artist that I've recently discovered, a guy named Eric Quach who records solo under the name Thisquietarmy, and he just released this amazing debut album through the Polish label Foreshadowm Productions, who some of you might recognize for releasing the reissue of Nadja's Corrasion CD last year. Unconquered actually features Aidan Baker from Nadja on the opening track, contributing some of his heavenly guitar feedback and gossamer textures to the song, and his presence on this disc might give you an idea of what kind of sound is happening here....the first few tracks focus on heavy guitar-based ambience formed from gorgeous dreamy melodic drift and slabs of sculpted feedback, dark and fuzzy sheets of amplifier drone and shimmering distorted strings. Fans of Aidan Baker and Troum would love this stuff.

But the album isn't all just ambient guitarscapes. The third song "Warchitects" makes that pretty clear as it kicks in with pounding industrial rhythm and majestic grinding riffage; from the beginning, the song is an awesome combination of epic synth-like melodies and crushing ethereal dirge, like a space-rock Godflesh doing the anthemic closing song over the credit roll from an 80's teen movie. The following track "The Sun Destroyers" is also heavily rhythmic, but the rhythm here is a kind of rattling, clanking machine loop that cycles over and over underneath swells of fuzzy widescreen ambience that swirls and drifts along dreamily, as an ominous melodic guitar lead soars through the fog of violet twilight drones. Man, this is beautiful stuff, an evocative mix of industrial dreamsludge, dark guitar ambience, heavy fuzz-encrusted dronescapes, and the rest of the album moves through varying shades of these sonic elements...

But the highlight of Unconquered is without a doubt the sixth song, "The Great Escapist", where the plodding industrial drum machine rears up again with a pounding Godflesh-like beat, thumping away behind a gorgeous melody formed from nebulous guitar textures and what sounds like looped synths, and featuring the deep, soulful vocals of Meryem Yildiz. Her voice is gorgeous, and it turns what would have otherwise been amazing blissed-out sludge into something that sounds (much like the earlier track "Warchitects") like an unbelieveably beautiful 80's gloom-pop song infused with shoegazey industrial slowcore. I love that song.

This is an album that Nadja fans should check out, not that the two bands sound exactly alike, but there are definitely some similiarities, the dreamy guitar drift, the heavier shoegazey Godflesh-like stuff, all of that. But Thisquietarmy is much more dreamy, much less "metal", and the music has a heavily synthetic, sometimes propulsive quality that keeps reminding me of Tangerine Dream's electronic soundtracks from the 1980's and other epic, "synthy" soundscapes. It took me one listen to this to pick it as this week's featured release, and it's highly recommended to anyone into heavy, industrial-tinged ambience and gorgeously gloomy guitardrone.

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Crucial Blast Webstore is a great store hailing from Maryland, existing in conjunction with Crucial Blast Records, that specializes in heavy underground music that spans the adventurous, avant-garde, quirky, and downright weird.

4 October 2008

I focused on the strings and piano to give it an Ambient/Experimental feel, with Cocteau Twin-ish vocals, and a post-rock/shoegaze build-up at the end. I hope you like my take on the remix... even if you don't know the song, which i don't think is an issue at all.